1. Field
The following description relates to a storage device and a buffer memory management method of a storage device that may be used with a buffer memory.
2. Description of Related Art
A buffer memory compensates for differences in the operation speed of different devices, for example, a signal processor, a random access memory (RAM), a cache memory, or a read only memory (ROM). In many computing environments, information may be passed from one device to another to perform computing tasks, such as processing, storage, or communication. Such information may include processes, data, functions, or any other information that consumes computing resources. Information may be sent in packet form or in some other type of data stream in various applications. Each data access is associated with a separate call to memory. As described herein, accessing data includes writing data, reading data, and the like. When a high speed device and a slow speed device access data, latency may be introduced. This latency may be reduced by utilizing an appropriately sized buffer memory.
Examples of a buffer memory include a cache memory that compensates for a difference in speed between a central processing unit (CPU) and a memory, a buffer memory that compensates for a difference in speed between a host and a storage device, and the like.
The cost of buffer memory is often greater than the cost of other memory types, for example, RAM and Rom. Because the cost of increasing the size of buffer memory is relatively high compared with an increase of a processing speed, oftentimes a buffer memory having a relatively small capacity is used regardless of the speed of a corresponding processor. For example, a size of a buffer memory of a commonly used hard disk (HDD) may be about 4 MB to 32 MB. Accordingly, the volume of data that is able to be stored in a buffer in advance is relatively small when compared to the volume of data that may be stored in a RAM drive that may contain, for example, 40 GB to 250 GB of storage.